Has anyone here made Kefir? How do I get started? I am interested in making this because it sounds tasty and has good health benefits. Also sounds like you can make it to 1-2% alcohol if you make it traditionally.

It is basically a quickly fermented milk/yogurt drink that uses "Kefir Grains" for inoculation. The grains are a cauliflower looking bunch of yeast and bacteria. I am not sure where to get them.

I make kefir. I got mine from some guy on craig's list who lives 20 minutes from me. I'm currently low on grains, having used them up on experiments, but once I get some excess I'd be happy to dry them out and mail them to you.

I am wondering if a lambic which had a kefir based starter pitched in it would be tasty? Too much lactobacillus? Kefir loses some of its spunk if you leave it for too long in a liquid other than milk, so I was imagining that the grains would be used to create the starter but removed before pitching.

I used to have an active Kefir culture, but managed to let it die when I was getting married and moving. What's amazing is that I've been able to continue to buy Kefir by the quart at my local market in the meantime, so I've kept consuming it, though I've definitely wanted to get back to regularly culturing my own - it's cheaper and I can customize the flavor. Sometimes, the flavors I want just aren't available at the store, and I realize I could be doing this again myself!

I just used the excellent link above to request a new culture from a local, I'll definitely keep y'all updated on the progress of my culturing.

Yeah, water kefir would probably be the best for doing up a lambic...not milk kefir, which tends to get weird in anything other than dairy. I want to get some water kefir and try this recipe for ginger beer: Ginger Beer Kefir

Just get your grains off ebay or craigs list. All the commercial sites selling kefir charge several times more than the bay....and really, originally, the spirit of kefir was to spread the grains around amongst people, not profit off them.

I was making it with raw milk for almost a year. I finally called it quits when a bug got in it.I did feel good when i was drinking it but it tasted pretty awfull on its own, almost couldnt hack it down, plus i was getting lazy and not going through the effort of making smoothies out of it,was better this way. They can give you some nasty nasty gas especially if you eat the grains, good for you yes nasty nasty nasty gas very possible.